Monday, February 11, 2013

Roman Markets and Polanyi's Pessimism

Emily Gowers reviews in the “Times Literary Supplement”, 8 February, p.
11: Claire Holleran. 2012. “Shopping in Ancient Rome: the retail trade in the
late Republic and the Principate”. Oxford University Press.

“Nice Girls Don’t Go There”.

“After all, the extraordinary minute gradations of choice we know were
available in imperial Rome – Pliny lists at least nine different types of
writing paper, twelve kinds of plum, twenty-seven varieties of liner – speak of
a complex system of discrimination and a demanding consumer base.The very existence of sumptuary laws
and other top-down attempts at limiting luxurious consumption (Julius Caesar’s
dawn raids on the meat markets, for example) attests to a society whose competitive
rituals of gift-giving and party- giving repeatedly threatened to spiral out of
control. …

The more limited sources for Rome suggest similar complexity in the
journey of goods from producer to buyer and an equally diverse field of
retailers, from the occasional “design house”, like that of “cosmos the cult
perfumer to the hawker from the other side of the Tiber (mentioned by Martial,
who made a living by trading broken glass for sulphur matches.Arcane vocabulary attached itself to
various trades: purpurarius meant a dealer in purple cloth, crepidarius maker
of sandals, coactilarius a felt worker, faber oculariarius a maker of eyes for
statues. … regular “ninth-day” Roman markets (nundinae) to which rural
smallholders brought their wares (if they had not already offloaded them on to
wholesalers); seasonal peaks, like the rush on sigillaria (traditional
figurines), hams and candles before the December Saturnalia; specialist
shopping districts, like the Horrea Piperataria for spices; and out of town
production sites, like the tile and brick factory owned by Domitia Lucilla,
mother of Marcus Aurelius. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill has recently traced (Rome’s
Cultural Revolution, 2008) a per Romancolation of metropolitan fashions into
small-town Roman Italy similar to that detected by Neil McKendrick for eighteenth-century
England. …Emperor Nero built a vast food hall, the Marcelum Magnam, and
celebrated it on his coins. …

They did have giant warehouses (horrea) lining the Tiber, and wholesalers
who maintained links with business contacts (negotiatores) across the
Empire.There were customs duties,
credit mechanisms and even the odd “pop-up” shop for merchandise that had
fallen off the back of a chariot. … another important difference from the
present day was the widespread that respectable people should not need to go
shopping. Cicero berates the ‘squalid” Epicurean Piso for going to market to
buy bread rather than having it baked at home. … the aspiration of the
self-made was “home-made, not “bought-in”.

Comment

The review illustrates the early emergence of market-based economic
activity of longevity undermining Polanyi’s claims of the uniqueness of 19th-century
capitalism, which claim was also made by Karl Marx for his purposes. Roman
civilisation added another major ingredient of market economies, namely large
government spending, particularly in Rome’s case that of an active garrison
army dispersed to all regions of the Empire.Of course, when western Rome fell in the 5th
century, it pulled the plug on economic development, that terminated market
growth until the 15th century.This coincidentally was around the same time as China, which had
invented most of the innovative technology in the world, turned away from external
trade by imperial edict and commenced nearly 500 years of stagnant economic
growth.

Karl Polanyi made much of
the changes taking place in 19th-century Britain in his “The Great
Transformation” (1944), a book popular amongLeftist scholars for its critique of fundamentals common to
“capitalism”. I have expressed my
criticism of Polanyi’s denial’s that markets were important features of
classical societies, long before they became dominantly familiar in the modern
period.I found support for my
critique of Polanyi’s thesis in Morris Silver’s stunning assembly of data in
his “Economic Structures of Antiquity” (1995, Greenwood).

Reading Emily Gower’s review in the “Times Literary Supplement”, I was
struck by the details she selected from Claire Holleran’s “Shopping in
Ancient Rome”.

Adam Smith was quite clear of the significance of markets in his
historical Four Phase chronology from humans leaving the forests (1st
Age of Man), the emergence of shepherding (2nd Age of Man)and the settlements required for
farming (3rd Age of Man) through to (“at last!”) commerce (4th Age
of Man).

Hunter-gatherer societies (1st Age) with their small
populations were (and surviving examples are) limited to what they could kill or gather from their immediate environments, relieved only by moving to another
area when their locality was hunted-gathered-out.World population in their heydays that lasted several million
years (all proto-human species) was relatively small and the land space remained vast.Illustrating this we know that in the
deep past there were at least two major population movements of predecessor
variants and Homo sapiens out of Africa into Europe and Asia, and later into
the Americas and Australia.

The emergence of shepherding and farming (2ndand
3rd Ages) changed the technologies of food acquisition.It was also associated with the
emergence of tool technologies, bodily decoration, and social rituals.But it was also still mainly small
scale because total populations were also small scale.

Commercial activities (4th Age) began to change everything.
Small settlements developed food processing and manufactured by-products. Mining
took various forms across the world.Incidentally, mining is an under-rated contributor to the growth of
commerce and technology, which developed quite separately from agriculture and
town-based commerce.

This created a remarkable growth in population that eliminated the
Malthusian trap because total outputs across all categories of subsistence
“necessities, conveniences, and amusements” grew at unprecedented rates,
raising for example per capita incomes from $1 or less a day towards $20 a day
by the end of the 19th century in a corner of North-West
Europe.It is now closer to $100 a
day across much of Europe, North America and other parts of the world with
similar adaptations of capitalist market systems.

Polanyi wrote during the 2nd world war and had a pessimistic
outlook.Those developing
countries that have and are now breaking through to and beyond the $1 a day
income levels or the bulk of their populations – elites in all human societies
known to mankind have always done better than majority of their populations in
all economic systems – have or are now experiencing the positive effect of markets on
their desperate situations.

These are the consequence of the only Great Transformation that
matters: the raising the living standards of the desperately poor by growing
their market economies.

The angst felt by intellectuals in their comfortable circumstances at
what is happening is vulnerable to the question of what do they suggest that is
practical as a workable alternative, given the experience of actual collapse of
20th-century socialist non-market experiments?

Given what happened after the collapse of the 5th-century
Roman markets and the invasion of the barbarian warlords, do they want to risk repeating
the centuries that followed?

Thanks Gene Callahan for your comments.Rome was not a market society by Polanyi’s definition of “embedded”. Markets nevertheless played an important role in Rome. Traditionalists took stances against grubby markets and those engaged in them. Interestingly a prejudice of old-style Roman elites shared by elites in 19th-and 20th century Britain (echoed in an “old money” snob’s dismissal of the high political ambitions of a “self-made” millionaire, as a man who “bought his own furniture”). Markets and what they transacted were always present in various forms in ancient civilisations (even the Bible’s “prodigal son” parable is about a son taking his “inheritance” early and spending it).Rome remained largely agricultural promoted by military conquests across Europe. Its military power enforced its rule within its basic agricultural economy. The existence of markets within Roman rule became of some significance as its civilisation promoted non-slave enrichments of its citizenry. Military occupation provided the officer class with their routes to immense riches that provided capital for decorated buildings and gardens for the Roman elite. Soldiers on frontier duties (lasting in 20-year sessions) spent their coin wages in local communities, stimulating local economies and providing taxes to government; captured enemies of Rome fed into the profits of the slave supply chain. Every evolution of the Ages of Man did not do so as an “event”. The revival of market activity (English wool to Europe) was a long process. Within agriculture the manufacturing of products was a process, lasting centuries. The 1400s was chosen as the revival date because of the accumulation of changes, technological and trade, which are noticeable in many examples. The post 5th-century date is chosen because the barbarian warlords were land grabbers and the disruptions disturbing populations (‘bandits’) in the countryside made inter-town trade too dangerous. Of course, some trade continued but not on the Roman scale.By “dominant” I refer to their general dominance in the minds and experiences of whole populations. Polanyi’s concepts of “embedded” and “not embedded” is a concept quite separate from the real world; he refers to the views of mainstream economists, especially neo-classical theorists, who eliminate people (particularly entrepreneurs) from their models, of which I regularly criticise. Adam Smith was more careful in his focus on explaining the working of economies both from his historical viewpoint and from his judgements about the people in them (the incompetence of government ministers and the rapacious behaviours of “merchants and manufacturers”). Hence, Smith never predicted the future; he offered advice that if adopted over time would resolves certain problems and improve certain outcomes. He was not utopian.Anyway, thank you for your contributions. Please feel free to make more.Gavin